Spanish Prisoners at Mauthausen

Spanish prisoners at
work in Mauthausen camp

The Mauthausen concentration camp was
the main place where Spanish political prisoners were incarcerated
by the Nazis. By 1941, three years after the main camp opened,
60% of the prisoners were Spanish Republicans. After their defeat
by General Francisco Franco's Army in the Spanish Civil War,
the Spanish Republicans escaped to France where they were put
into internment camps by the French government. After Germany
conquered France in 1940, around 30,000 of these prisoners were
deported by the Nazis to concentration camps in Germany and Austria
because of their anti-Fascist or Communist political affiliation.
They were called the Red Spaniards (Rotspanier) because Red was
the color of the Communists.

Up until August 1940, the German and
Austrian common-law criminals were the Kapos at Mauthausen; they
were assigned to supervise the other prisoners and would typically
beat them for the slightest infraction of the rules while the
SS guards looked the other way. The Spanish Republicans began
to arrive in the camp on August 6th and 9th, 1940; gradually
they took over the key positions in the camp from the German
Kapos.

The anti-Fascist Spaniards were well
organized; they were the only cohesive group in the camp, held
together by their political beliefs. Later, when the Communist
Czechs and French resistance fighters arrived, they joined forces
with the Red Spaniards to dominate the camp. The German criminals
had no solidarity and did not act as a group, so they did not
remain in control.

Christian Bernadac, author of the book
"The 186 Steps," wrote the following regarding the
Spanish Republicans:

They were Republican soldiers who
began to come across the French frontier in February 1939, after
the fall of Catalonia. They hoped to build up their strength,
regroup, train and leave for the other side of the Pyrenees,
where genuine pockets of resistance still held out. They arrived
with arms and baggage, and all this good material rotted on the
snow-covered mountain passes or the wet slopes of the Mediterranean...

And they, the vanquished serfs, were
herded into improvised "transit" camps, where they
died, literally, of hunger, cold and dysentery. The strongest,
the most motivated, tried to reconstruct a military or political
hierarchy, but many of them, most of them, were annihilated by
the defeat and abandoned the struggle. The history of these French
concentration camps has never been written: Le Vernet-d'Ariege,
Saint-Cyprien, Barcares, Argeles, Gurs, Septfonds...Their story
should be known.

Then, volunteers or not, the Spanish
Republicans found themselves enrolled in work crews or irregular
battalions of foreign volunteers. The rising tide of the German
army swept them into prison camps where the Gestapo had no difficulty
at all in re-grouping them and sending them to Mauthausen.

According to Bernadac, the Spanish Republicans
"wore the blue triangle of religious objectors." In
the other Nazi concentration camps, blue was the color of the
foreign workers brought to Germany, for example the 1,701,412
Poles who were slave laborers in camps such as Dachau. The Jehovah's
Witnesses wore purple triangles. Two of the Spanish prisoners,
Marcel Razola and Mariano Constante, wrote a book about their
ordeal in Mauthausen; the title of the book was "Triangle
bleu" (Blue Triangle).

The first two convoys of Spaniards who
were deported to Mauthausen were brought first to the quarry
instead of going directly to the front gate of the camp. Their
introduction to the camp was the sight of the German Kapos beating
the prisoners to force them to work faster. Jose Escobedo, one
of the Spanish prisoners, described their arrival. His account
was included in the book "Triangle bleu" which was
quoted by Christian Bernadac in his book:

We were stunned. It was a prison,
we said to each other, like a prison in horror films. It was
impossible that they meant to keep us here. We were soldiers,
and not criminals. They lined us up in rows of five and we climbed
the 180 steps that led to the camp. We passed men carrying stones
who seemed to be Spaniards. When we thought about it, it didn't
appear to be possible. Probably they were just going to have
us pass the night in this camp before transferring us to a work
site provided for by the Geneva Convention. Some of us still
nurtured an unlimited innocence. Still in line, we were marched
in front of the watchtowers with their sentinels, armed with
machine guns.

British Author David Wingeate Pike published
a book entitled "Spaniards in the Holocaust: Mauthausen,
the Horror on the Danube" in 2000, in which he told the
story of the Spanish Republicans in Mauthausen. He got much of
his information from Juan de Diego, who was a Kapo in the Mauthausen
camp. Diego was one of the privileged block leaders in Mauthausen;
in this capacity, he had the opportunity to hide some of the
incriminating evidence of atrocities from being destroyed by
the German guards before they left the camp in the last week
of the war.

According to Pike, 90% of the Spanish
Republicans, who had previously been interned in France, were
sent to Mauthausen in 1940 and 1941. Records saved by the Spanish
survivors show that 23,400 Spanish prisoners were registered
at Mauthausen and its subcamps and that 16,310 of them died,
leaving around 9,200 survivors.

The majority of the Spanish prisoners
at Mauthausen worked in the quarries, but some had administrative
jobs. Among the later group were Antonio Garcia Alonso and Francesco
Boix Campo, according to Pike, who wrote that Boix was sent to
Mauthausen on January 27, 1941. Because of his facility with
German, Boix initially worked as a translator in the camp. Garcia
arrived in Mauthausen on April 7, 1941. Because he was a trained
photographer, Garcia was assigned to work in the camp's photo
lab, Erkennungsdienst.

The SS photographer Kornacz was the only
one who took photographs, but he employed inmates to handle the
developing, printing and filing of the photo archive. Kornacz
was assigned to take mug shots of arriving prisoners and to photograph
official visits to the camp as well as the bodies of prisoners
who died. He instructed his assistants to print five copies of
each photograph: one for the camp archive and one each to be
sent to Berlin, Oranienburg, Vienna and Linz.

Francesco Boix is on
the far left with a camera hanging on his chest

According to Pike, before Garcia's arrival
in the lab, a Polish prisoner named Grabowski, began developing
a sixth print of key photographs, which he hid behind a wooden
beam in the ceiling. After Garcia became responsible for developing
film and enlarging photographs, he and Grabowski began compiling
a secret photo archive. In order to prevent suspicion in case
the secret prints were ever found, Garcia moved the photographs
to a file cabinet. In June 1941, Kornacz was sent to the eastern
front and replaced by SS Hauptscharführer Paul Ricken who
was not only an excellent trained photographer, but also a man
who abhorred violence and treated his prisoner assistants quite
humanely, according to Pike's book. Ricken reorganized the lab
and gave Garcia added responsibilities. The two photographers
developed a rapport, and Ricken agreed to Garcia's request to
engage an additional assistant. At Garcia's suggestion, Ricken
appointed Boix.

Pike wrote that Boix knew relatively
little about photography, but Garcia wanted to have a fellow
Catalan in the lab. The relationship between the two Spaniards
became more problematic than Garcia had anticipated. During this
time, Garcia and Grabowski continued to print a clandestine sixth
copy of key photographs and accumulated an archive of some 200
prints.

In 1944 Grabowski committed suicide,
and in February 1945 Garcia fell seriously ill and was taken
to the camp infirmary where he remained for over a month. Upon
his return, he discovered that the secret archive was missing.
He questioned Boix, who was the only other person having any
knowledge of the archive. Boix admitted that he had taken the
photographs, but he said that they were now in the hands of the
camp's Spanish Communist underground. Garcia, though sympathetic
to Communism, was accused by some of Trotskyism and was not part
of the underground's inner circle. Garcia was furious, but there
was little he could do. He continued to work with Boix saving
key photographs, even after Camp Commandant Franz Ziereis ordered
the destruction of all negatives during the last week of the
war.

According to Pike, the Spanish Communist
underground temporarily hid Garcia's photos in several locales
within the administrative complex of the camp while looking for
a safer hiding place outside of the camp. They decided to give
the photos to the boys of the Poschacher Kommando. This labor
brigade, made up of young Spanish teenagers, worked in quarries
outside the camp itself. During the last months of the war, the
brigade had almost no direct supervision by the SS. Over time,
the boys had become friendly with Anna Pointner, an Austrian
socialist who lived near their work site. She frequently tossed
extra food to the boys and eventually confided her political
views to them. Feeling they could trust her, the boys asked whether
she would be willing to hide some small parcels for them.

Two boys, named Jacinto Cortes and Jesus
Grau, whose job it was to bring food to the Kommando in hampers,
gradually transferred the entire archive hidden in these lunch
hampers. Anna Pointner then hid the photos in a crevice in her
garden wall.

After the war, Boix photographed the
liberation with a confiscated German camera. He retrieved the
camp photographs, which he later published. Boix testified at
the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg regarding photographic
evidence from Mauthausen.

According to Martin Gilbert, the author
of a book entitled"Holocaust," there were 8,000 Spanish
Republicans at the main Mauthausen camp and only 817 of them
survived. Gilbert wrote the following in his book:

In just over four months, more than
thirty thousand people had been murdered at Mauthausen, or had
died from starvation and disease. Jews and Gypsies formed the
largest group of those killed, but other groups had also been
singled out by the Nazis: homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Soviet
prisoners-of-war, and tens of thousands of Spanish Republicans.
These Spaniards had been interned in France in September 1939,
deported by the Germans to Mauthausen in 1940, and systematically
worked to death in the stone quarry there, or shot at random.
By January 1945, only three thousand of the Spaniards had remained
alive. Of these, 2,163 had been killed in the next three months.